New Outcry Unfolds After St. Louis Officer Kills Black Teenager

Image

Demonstrators confronted the St. Louis police on Thursday near the site where an 18-year-old was fatally shot by an off-duty police officer who was on patrol for a private security company.CreditWhitney Curtis for The New York Times

ST. LOUIS — Two months after a police officer’s killing of an unarmed black teenager set off weeks of racial conflict in a St. Louis suburb, tense clashes emerged here late Thursday after the Wednesday shooting death of a black teenager by a white police officer.

Demonstrators angry about conduct of law enforcement officers in the region staged a peaceful, if disruptive, protest throughout the evening, and blocked traffic along Grand Boulevard and other side streets. The protesters, some of whom burned or stomped on American flags, chanted demands for justice.

And for most of the night, the St. Louis police watched from afar, adjusting their locations as people marched through the streets and avoiding interactions with them. A helicopter circled and occasionally directed its spotlight toward the crowd.

But at around 10 p.m., the protest grew chaotic as officers clutching riot shields and pepper-spray canisters rushed into the crowd. It was not immediately clear what provoked the abrupt response; Chief D. Samuel Dotson III of the St. Louis police said two people were arrested and an officer sustained minor injuries, KMOV-TV reported. An armored vehicle with two officers’ heads visible poking through its roof hatch crawled along Grand Boulevard, and dozens of other police vehicles flooded the area, where protesters and officers cursed at one another as a standoff began.

The turn of events came just over 24 hours after the killing of Vonderrit D. Myers Jr., 18, who was shot after what the authorities termed a “physical altercation” with an off-duty St. Louis officer who was patrolling the city’s Shaw neighborhood for a security firm.

The officer had been driving when he saw three men and one of them began to run, the police said. He turned his vehicle and all of them began to run, the police said. After a pursuit, the police said, Mr. Myers fired three rounds with a stolen handgun toward the officer before the gun malfunctioned; the officer responded with 17 shots. The police did not release the officer’s name.

The police said they recovered evidence that showed Mr. Myers had opened fire, but family members disputed that and said he had been unarmed. He was carrying a sandwich, they said.

“The police are lying,” Joseph Cotton, Mr. Myers’s grandfather, said as he stood outside the family home on Thursday afternoon.

Soon after the shooting on Wednesday night, hundreds of demonstrators appeared in the streets. The police said three department vehicles were damaged during the spontaneous protests.

“St. Louis is a racial powder keg,” said Jerryl Christmas, who was involved in the demonstrations that shook nearby Ferguson, after a white officer there killed another 18-year-old, Michael Brown, on Aug. 9. “You’ve got the combination of this situation happening in St. Louis city and St. Louis County. It’s not just Ferguson.”

Mr. Myers’s death came just before a planned “Weekend of Resistance” in the St. Louis region to protest law enforcement practices that have been under scrutiny since Mr. Brown, who was unarmed, died.

Mr. Brown’s death is the subject of local and federal inquiries, and some here called for comparable reviews in the case of Mr. Myers. They said Mr. Myers may have been profiled when he and two other black men first attracted the attention of the officer, who has been on St. Louis police force for six years.

“White police officers are fearful of young black males, but that doesn’t justify profiling them each and every day when they’re out and about,” said State Senator Jamilah Nasheed.

The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment about whether it would open the formal inquiry some of the protesters sought, but the St. Louis circuit attorney, Jennifer M. Joyce, said that an assistant United States attorney would be among the prosecutors reviewing the results of the police investigation.

Mr. Myers was scheduled to stand trial for charges that included unlawful use of a weapon and resisting arrest.

In a probable-cause statement filed in late June, a St. Louis police officer wrote that Mr. Myers had been arrested after he fled from the authorities and dropped a pistol into a sewage drain.

Peter M. Cohen, a lawyer who was representing Mr. Myers in the pending court case, described Mr. Myers as “a quiet, respectful young man” and said that his survivors were distraught.

“They were hoping to be getting graduation clothes for him,” Mr. Cohen said, “and now it’s going to have to be funeral clothes.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A18 of the New York edition with the headline: New Outcry Unfolds After St. Louis Officer Kills Black Teenager. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe